Thirty-two young women, most of them pictured here from 1925, are the first graduates of the Ottawa Civic Hospital School of Nursing. Only single women “in good health with a robust constitution” were admitted to the red-brick nurses’ residence at 737 Parkdale Avenue, until 1969 when the rules changed, allowing married women into the program. According to archival information, life at the school was demanding and highly regimented. “Smoking, alcohol, and bobbed hair were forbidden.”
Ottawa philanthropist and community-builder Jean Teron proudly wears her mother’s 1924 nursing pin, given to 20-year-old Ida Catherine McDowell when she graduated from the program nearly a century ago. Jean’s sister Katherine also graduated from the Civic Hospital School of Nursing.
“My mother’s hand scratching in her biography says that she was so happy at the Civic to receive a mark of 100 on her medical nursing exam,” says Jean. “My mother says she did really well as an A1 nurse, whatever that is, despite the long hours and very little pay.” Jean says her mother and best friend Jean Forbes were the first Civic graduates to go on to higher education, studying Public Health Nursing at McGill.
By the time the School of Nursing closed in 1973, more than 4,000 graduates had made the symbolic walk down the front steps of the Civic Hospital, marking the start of their nursing career.
